As reported by the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), in the United States 117 million people have chronic health conditions. In addition to this, one out of four elderly persons experience a fall each year, with fewer than half informing a doctor or medical professional. Patient monitoring systems provide their users and healthcare providers the ability to monitor patients remotely in the event of complications such as heart attacks or falls.
Many prior attempts on remote patient monitoring systems allow limited patient location tracking or monitor only physiological data for use of healthcare officials. In the case of the latter, monitoring exclusively physiological data such as blood pressure or heart rate may not allow for reporting of events such as over exposure to sun light or the patient experiencing a fall. This results in emergency response not being received when most necessary.
Many current state-of-the-art patient tracking systems offer exclusively room level tracking. Some return patient location only when specific conditions are met, such an example would be when a patient leaves a room. These limitations render the tracking features unusable if the patient leaves the facility, additionally this offers no way to establish the location of the patient once the patient has left the room. This is due to the systems use of radiofrequency identification (RFID) and/or WiFi (i.e. wireless local area networking based on the IEEE 802.11 standard) for delivering location exclusively at choke points such as an entry/exit. Furthermore, many systems lack secondary power sources or alternative means of battery recharging. This introduces constraints to the time available to locate a patient in need.